The proposed research will apply the theoretical and empirical work arising from laboratory studies of causal attribution and decision making with an information processing framework, to the parole decision process. The goals of the research are to increase the knowledge of the parole decision process, with attendant policy implications including the improvement of parole decisions, to provide additional support and generalizability to the theories, and to promote more integration among the theories. Subjects will include expert parole decision makers, and college students, used to develop materials. The first study established a data-base of 1000 actual parole decisions including archival coding of case files, postrelease parole outcomes, and post-decision questionnaires of Hearings Examiner's inferences and judgements. Two studies will experimentally investigate the role of causal attributions in the parole decision by manipulating information in case summaries. One study will examine verbal protocols from Hearings Examiners as they examine actual case files, including manipulations designed to test the effect of crime seriousness and crime type (person vs. property) on decisions. One study will investigate the use of base-rate or consensus information. The last study will create a questionnaire measure of the individual decision maker's goal and beliefs about crime causation and the efficacy of alternative responses in meeting the goals, and relate this to responses in the other studies.